A few days ago, I briefly noted a handful of very useful online linguistic resources, and suggested that we should do more to advertise and comment on resources like these.

A reader writes to mention Introduction to Segmental Phonology, a very cool website “designed to help students of segmental phonology understand and identify phonological segments and their distinctive features.”

That reminds me that the software section of Bruce Hayes’ web page has links to two other cool phonology teaching tools: FeaturePad (“Learn features, check your use of features to describe natural classes and feature changes.”) and PhonologyPad (“Use a computer to implement and check solutions to classical paradigm-based phonology problems.”). FeaturePad was programmed by Kie Zuraw and PhonologyPad was written by Dan Albro.

In case you didn’t already know, one of Bruce Hayes’ other highly useful software tools is OTSoft (“Rank constraints in Optimality Theory using a variety of algorithms”), an extremely useful tool for working with Optimality Theory. Credit for this software goes to Bruce Hayes, Bruce Tesar and Kie Zuraw.

As great as FeaturePad, PhonologyPad, and OTSoft are, they have one drawback: they only work on Windows 95 (or later). The source code for OTSoft can be requested from Bruce, however — anyone care to redo it in java or something?